However, I think you mean that the expected welfare range will be significant (for example, at least 1 % of that of humans) as long as there is one plausible model (for example, which gets 10 % weight) which predicts a significant welfare range (for example, 10 % of that of humans).
Yeah, basically.
I wonder whether electromagnetic (EM) field theories of consciousness could shed some light on it. I assume the maximum intensity of the EM fields generated by brain activity depends on the number of neurons, at least when assessed across species (there is little variance in the number of neurons of humans, which means the maximum intensity of EM fields may not vary much in humans).
This makes me think we’re inclined towards a different basic perspective on the determinants of valence. This kind of sounds like you’re thinking of pain as a sort of physical magnitude, like weight or charge. Then it is reasonable to think it is likely to scale with size, so that much smaller brains are likely to have much smaller magnitudes. I’m more inclined towards functionalist interpretations of welfare, on which something like relative functional significance determines welfare levels. E.g. something’s attention-grabbing capacity helps to determine its welfare significance. In that case, you might be deeply skeptical that small animals have the right functional role at all, but once you grant they do, it is much more plausible that welfare ranges are similar to humans. However, for my point to be right, I think you just need to treat these kinds of functionalist views as in the running. You don’t have to be confident that they’re true.
I’ve always found the functionalist view more intuitively compelling. The idea that experiential intensity simply scales down with the number of neurons seems hard to accept: it implies that simpler organisms live something like a barely-there flicker of experience, which also places us humans at the apex of perceived intensity in the universe. That seems to me like a sort of anthropocentrism, which could be a little suspicious.
I also think there’s a distinction worth drawing between the “dimensionality” of an experience (how many qualitative states a mind can occupy) and its intensity. A simple mind might have very few “keys,” but still hit each of them hard. A shrimp might have a very narrow experiential range, with little going on beyond basic valenced states, but that needn’t make those states less intense. If that’s right, “simpler brain” doesn’t automatically mean “smaller welfare range.”
The idea that experiential intensity simply scales down with the number of neurons seems hard to accept: it implies that simpler organisms live something like a barely-there flicker of experience, which also places us humans at the apex of perceived intensity in the universe.
Very simple organisms could still matter a lot despite having much less intense experiences. I estimatefarmed animals and soil invertebrateshave 1.87 and 253 times as many neurons as humans. The graph below has more detail. Nematodes are the animals with the least neurons, with an adult caenorhabditis elegans having 302 neurons, but I estimate soil nematodes have 169 times as many neurons in total as humans.
humans at the apex of perceived intensity in the universe
There are animals with more neurons than humans. Short-finned pilot whales and african elephants have 128 billion and 257 billion neurons, 1.49 (= 128⁄86) and 2.99 (= 257⁄86) times as many as humans.
I also think there’s a distinction worth drawing between the “dimensionality” of an experience (how many qualitative states a mind can occupy) and its intensity. A simple mind might have very few “keys,” but still hit each of them hard.
Very simple organisms could still matter a lot despite having much less intense experiences.
I agree, assuming they are conscious.
I think the case of elephants and whales actually highlights why using total neuron count as a proxy for welfare range can be a little tricky. If we look at the African elephant’s 257 billion neurons, it’s a staggering number. But most of those neurons are located in the cerebellum, primarily dedicated to motor control of their large bodies. This suggests that neuron count alone is too crude a metric (though perhaps useful when comparing organisms with very different brains). Parameters like encephalization quotient or cortical neuron density might do better, though I’m not sure any of them cleanly captures intensity of experience rather than cognitive complexity. That said, these would be really only meaningful for vertebrates, which perhaps just underlines how hard the welfare range question actually is for organisms very different from us.
This suggests that neuron count alone is too crude a metric (though perhaps useful when comparing organisms with very different brains).
I like to compare the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges (probability of sentience times the welfare range conditional on sentience) of organisms with neurons assuming they are proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”. I consider exponents from 0 to 2 reasonable best guesses. An exponent of 0.188 explains very well the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges presented in Bob’s book (which rely on much more than the individual number of neurons). Below is a graph illustrating this.
For comparisons involving organisms with and without neurons, I would assume sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to “individual mass”^”exponent”, or “metabolic rate”^”exponent”. I do not think the specific proxy matters that much. In allometry, “the study of the relationship of body size to shape,[1]anatomy, physiology and behaviour”, “The relationship between the two measured quantities is often expressed as a power law equation (allometric equation)”. If the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to “proxy 1“^”exponent 1”, and “proxy 1” is proportional to “proxy 2“^”exponent 2”, the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to “proxy 1”^(“exponent 1“*”exponent 2”). So the results for “proxy 1” and exponent “exponent 1“*”exponent 2” are the same as those for “proxy 2” and “exponent 2″.
I’m more inclined towards functionalist interpretations of welfare, on which something like relative functional significance determines welfare levels. E.g. something’s attention-grabbing capacity helps to determine its welfare significance. In that case, you might be deeply skeptical that small animals have the right functional role at all, but once you grant they do, it is much more plausible that welfare ranges are similar to humans.
One possibility for attention-grabbing: beings’ welfare ranges may be proportional to how much attention they have to grab, and beings with richer/more detailed experiences could have more units of attention to be grabbed, with an analogy between the number of details in a visual field like the number of pixels in a computer screen. That being said, I’m not sure it’s any less valid for it to be independent of the number of possible separate elements in conscious attention at a time, and I suspect it’s just a matter of normative interpretation, not a matter of empirical fact.
I also think there are degrees to which something is an attentional mechanism at all or has a given functional role, that could have normative significance, and it’s unlikely that there’s an objective fact of the matter about how we should weigh these degrees. See my piece Gradations of moral weight, basically another two envelopes problem.
This kind of sounds like you’re thinking of pain as a sort of physical magnitude, like weight or charge.
I liked this chat I had with Gemini 3.1 Pro about the relationship between the intensity of subjective experiences, and the size of neuronal avalanches. You and @Bob Fischer may also find it interesting.
This kind of sounds like you’re thinking of pain as a sort of physical magnitude, like weight or charge.
Yes.
I’m more inclined towards functionalist interpretations of welfare
Which kind of functionalism? I am very sceptical of at least computational functionalism (CF). Any algorithm run by a digital computer can be executed with pen and paper (although it may take a super long time), and I have a hard time imagining how such process would itself be conscious.
In that case, you might be deeply skeptical that small animals have the right functional role at all, but once you grant they do, it is much more plausible that welfare ranges are similar to humans.
This assumes that the effect on welfare of having the right functional role is not moderated, or is only very weakly moderated, by physical quantities like the number of neurons (as in Bob’s book). I find this very counterintuitive. It implies that a human who is the size of a galaxy would have the same welfare as a normal human.
However, for my point to be right, I think you just need to treat these kinds of functionalist views as in the running. You don’t have to be confident that they’re true.
I agree. However, I think the weight of models which are practically not sensitive to physical quantities could be astronomically low. Mistakes like the one I illustrated above about gravitational force happen when the weights of models are guessed independently of their consequences. I suspect the variance in weights should not be that different from the variance in the consequences. For example, for welfare ranges of a) 10^-100, b) 10^-10, and c) 1, I would guess weights not that different from 1 on a), 10^-10 on b), and 10^-100 on c).
Which kind of functionalism? I am very sceptical of at least computational functionalism (CF). Any algorithm run by a digital computer can be executed with pen and paper (although it may take a super long time), and I have a hard time imagining how such process would itself be conscious.
I’m skeptical of functionalism about consciousness (though I don’t know any alternative that fares better.) But functionalism about valence seems much harder to avoid. Maybe if you have a benevolent God? Or some sort of dualism? Otherwise, it seems to me that you’re going to be hard-pressed to explain why it is that the functional role of valence aligns with whatever properties constitute the fact that valence matters. Why is it that pain is bad and we avoid it, or pleasure is good and we seek it, if it is not just the case that the things we’re inclined to avoid count as pain, and the things we’re inclined to seek count as pleasure (very roughly).
In case it helps, this is (super roughly!) how I think about some of these questions:
I think panpsychism fares much better than functionalism (generally). It seems odd to me that (many) (computational) functionalists seem OK with claims like “consciousness is simply what certain algorithms / information processing / etc. feel like from the inside” (especially given the arbritrariness of algorithms), yet struggle to see how consciousness could be what the fundamental fields of physics (or whatever is at the base layer of reality) feel like from the inside (those are not arbitrary).
More precisely, phenomenally bound minds like ours are what certain configurations of the fields of physics, and especially the EM field, feel like from the inside.
Though as Atai Barkai has very eloquently pointed out, simply stating that the fields of physics are made of qualia (~Russellian monism) does not automatically solve the phenomenal binding problem. But that’s a separate (IMO surmountable) problem (and Barkai gives one possible solution).
I currently think that the Symmetry Theory of Valence, despite being in its infancy, has more explanatory power and is more parsimonious than competing theories of pleasure and suffering.
Putting panpsychism and STV together paints this (admittedly hand-wavy) picture:
Any physical system has an associated valence, proportional to its degree of symmetry/asymmetry (consonance/dissonance).
In the case of human nervous systems, this could be the degree of dissonance present in the spectrum of EM waves that make up our world simulation; see here for more.
Evolution made use of this low-level fact about the universe to design organisms that feel pleasure when they do things aligned with their reproductive success (and the converse with suffering).
But this is an imperfect implementation that can be gamed. For example, we can feel lots of pleasure for reasons totally unrelated to our reproductive success (e.g. the jhanas or a good 5-MeO-DMT trip, which STV seems to predict / capture just fine: the phenomenal fields become simpler and more harmonious).
(Not surprisingly, this position is very QRI-informed.)
Yeah, basically.
This makes me think we’re inclined towards a different basic perspective on the determinants of valence. This kind of sounds like you’re thinking of pain as a sort of physical magnitude, like weight or charge. Then it is reasonable to think it is likely to scale with size, so that much smaller brains are likely to have much smaller magnitudes. I’m more inclined towards functionalist interpretations of welfare, on which something like relative functional significance determines welfare levels. E.g. something’s attention-grabbing capacity helps to determine its welfare significance. In that case, you might be deeply skeptical that small animals have the right functional role at all, but once you grant they do, it is much more plausible that welfare ranges are similar to humans. However, for my point to be right, I think you just need to treat these kinds of functionalist views as in the running. You don’t have to be confident that they’re true.
I’ve always found the functionalist view more intuitively compelling. The idea that experiential intensity simply scales down with the number of neurons seems hard to accept: it implies that simpler organisms live something like a barely-there flicker of experience, which also places us humans at the apex of perceived intensity in the universe. That seems to me like a sort of anthropocentrism, which could be a little suspicious.
I also think there’s a distinction worth drawing between the “dimensionality” of an experience (how many qualitative states a mind can occupy) and its intensity. A simple mind might have very few “keys,” but still hit each of them hard. A shrimp might have a very narrow experiential range, with little going on beyond basic valenced states, but that needn’t make those states less intense. If that’s right, “simpler brain” doesn’t automatically mean “smaller welfare range.”
Hi Riccardo.
Very simple organisms could still matter a lot despite having much less intense experiences. I estimate farmed animals and soil invertebrates have 1.87 and 253 times as many neurons as humans. The graph below has more detail. Nematodes are the animals with the least neurons, with an adult caenorhabditis elegans having 302 neurons, but I estimate soil nematodes have 169 times as many neurons in total as humans.
There are animals with more neurons than humans. Short-finned pilot whales and african elephants have 128 billion and 257 billion neurons, 1.49 (= 128⁄86) and 2.99 (= 257⁄86) times as many as humans.
I agree.
Hi Vasco, thanks for the useful data!
I agree, assuming they are conscious.
I think the case of elephants and whales actually highlights why using total neuron count as a proxy for welfare range can be a little tricky. If we look at the African elephant’s 257 billion neurons, it’s a staggering number. But most of those neurons are located in the cerebellum, primarily dedicated to motor control of their large bodies. This suggests that neuron count alone is too crude a metric (though perhaps useful when comparing organisms with very different brains). Parameters like encephalization quotient or cortical neuron density might do better, though I’m not sure any of them cleanly captures intensity of experience rather than cognitive complexity. That said, these would be really only meaningful for vertebrates, which perhaps just underlines how hard the welfare range question actually is for organisms very different from us.
You may be interested in these posts:
What If We Assumed That All Animals Are Conscious?.
The Conscious Nematode: Exploring Hallmarks of Minimal Phenomenal Consciousness in Caenorhabditis Elegans.
I like to compare the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges (probability of sentience times the welfare range conditional on sentience) of organisms with neurons assuming they are proportional to “individual number of neurons”^”exponent”. I consider exponents from 0 to 2 reasonable best guesses. An exponent of 0.188 explains very well the sentience-adjusted welfare ranges presented in Bob’s book (which rely on much more than the individual number of neurons). Below is a graph illustrating this.
For comparisons involving organisms with and without neurons, I would assume sentience-adjusted welfare ranges proportional to “individual mass”^”exponent”, or “metabolic rate”^”exponent”. I do not think the specific proxy matters that much. In allometry, “the study of the relationship of body size to shape,[1] anatomy, physiology and behaviour”, “The relationship between the two measured quantities is often expressed as a power law equation (allometric equation)”. If the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to “proxy 1“^”exponent 1”, and “proxy 1” is proportional to “proxy 2“^”exponent 2”, the sentience-adjusted welfare range is proportional to “proxy 1”^(“exponent 1“*”exponent 2”). So the results for “proxy 1” and exponent “exponent 1“*”exponent 2” are the same as those for “proxy 2” and “exponent 2″.
Thanks for the detailed response and the links!
The exponent-based approach is interesting, though I’m still a little uncertain about its validity. I’ll check out the posts!
Here is some more context about the exponent-based approach.
One possibility for attention-grabbing: beings’ welfare ranges may be proportional to how much attention they have to grab, and beings with richer/more detailed experiences could have more units of attention to be grabbed, with an analogy between the number of details in a visual field like the number of pixels in a computer screen. That being said, I’m not sure it’s any less valid for it to be independent of the number of possible separate elements in conscious attention at a time, and I suspect it’s just a matter of normative interpretation, not a matter of empirical fact.
I also think there are degrees to which something is an attentional mechanism at all or has a given functional role, that could have normative significance, and it’s unlikely that there’s an objective fact of the matter about how we should weigh these degrees. See my piece Gradations of moral weight, basically another two envelopes problem.
I liked this chat I had with Gemini 3.1 Pro about the relationship between the intensity of subjective experiences, and the size of neuronal avalanches. You and @Bob Fischer may also find it interesting.
Yes.
Which kind of functionalism? I am very sceptical of at least computational functionalism (CF). Any algorithm run by a digital computer can be executed with pen and paper (although it may take a super long time), and I have a hard time imagining how such process would itself be conscious.
This assumes that the effect on welfare of having the right functional role is not moderated, or is only very weakly moderated, by physical quantities like the number of neurons (as in Bob’s book). I find this very counterintuitive. It implies that a human who is the size of a galaxy would have the same welfare as a normal human.
I agree. However, I think the weight of models which are practically not sensitive to physical quantities could be astronomically low. Mistakes like the one I illustrated above about gravitational force happen when the weights of models are guessed independently of their consequences. I suspect the variance in weights should not be that different from the variance in the consequences. For example, for welfare ranges of a) 10^-100, b) 10^-10, and c) 1, I would guess weights not that different from 1 on a), 10^-10 on b), and 10^-100 on c).
I’m skeptical of functionalism about consciousness (though I don’t know any alternative that fares better.) But functionalism about valence seems much harder to avoid. Maybe if you have a benevolent God? Or some sort of dualism? Otherwise, it seems to me that you’re going to be hard-pressed to explain why it is that the functional role of valence aligns with whatever properties constitute the fact that valence matters. Why is it that pain is bad and we avoid it, or pleasure is good and we seek it, if it is not just the case that the things we’re inclined to avoid count as pain, and the things we’re inclined to seek count as pleasure (very roughly).
In case it helps, this is (super roughly!) how I think about some of these questions:
I think panpsychism fares much better than functionalism (generally). It seems odd to me that (many) (computational) functionalists seem OK with claims like “consciousness is simply what certain algorithms / information processing / etc. feel like from the inside” (especially given the arbritrariness of algorithms), yet struggle to see how consciousness could be what the fundamental fields of physics (or whatever is at the base layer of reality) feel like from the inside (those are not arbitrary).
More precisely, phenomenally bound minds like ours are what certain configurations of the fields of physics, and especially the EM field, feel like from the inside.
Though as Atai Barkai has very eloquently pointed out, simply stating that the fields of physics are made of qualia (~Russellian monism) does not automatically solve the phenomenal binding problem. But that’s a separate (IMO surmountable) problem (and Barkai gives one possible solution).
I currently think that the Symmetry Theory of Valence, despite being in its infancy, has more explanatory power and is more parsimonious than competing theories of pleasure and suffering.
Putting panpsychism and STV together paints this (admittedly hand-wavy) picture:
Any physical system has an associated valence, proportional to its degree of symmetry/asymmetry (consonance/dissonance).
In the case of human nervous systems, this could be the degree of dissonance present in the spectrum of EM waves that make up our world simulation; see here for more.
Evolution made use of this low-level fact about the universe to design organisms that feel pleasure when they do things aligned with their reproductive success (and the converse with suffering).
But this is an imperfect implementation that can be gamed. For example, we can feel lots of pleasure for reasons totally unrelated to our reproductive success (e.g. the jhanas or a good 5-MeO-DMT trip, which STV seems to predict / capture just fine: the phenomenal fields become simpler and more harmonious).
(Not surprisingly, this position is very QRI-informed.)